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The following fifty proprietary programs are listed in no particular order within broad categories along with their open source alternatives. In some cases you could probably write your own book on frustrations with the proprietary programs shown here. In other cases, you’ll discover that the open source alternative isn’t quite up to snuff yet. And, in other cases still, you’ll learn that some proprietary programs are real gems, but that the open source advocate can replace those gems with equally shiny objects from the open source repertoire.

I don't necessarily agree with everything in this list, but it's a good place to start if you're wondering whether your critical needs will be covered if you switch to Linux, or if you just want to try something different on Windows. Many of my favorites are on the list.

The last couple of days I've been helping the chaoswolf
install Ubuntu on her ageing HP Celeron system. The initial problem, of
course, was to back up the old contents; I tried several hacks of varying
effectiveness before discovering that the Seagate drive I was using came
with a Windows partition-imaging program on its install CD. Who knew?

Once that was taken care of, actually doing the install was a piece of
cake, modulo a crash scanning the partition table and its inability to
shrink the existing NTFS partition as much as it should have been able
to. (There may be a connection.) There may be some bad memory in that
box; it's quite flaky.

The Wolfling seems to be pretty happy with Ubuntu, which is a good sign.
Of course, she still has her shiny new XP machine; I'll get her a KVM
switch tomorrow.

The code, published over the weekend by researchers Adrian Pastor and Petko Petkov, exploits features in two technologies: The UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) protocol, which is used by many operating systems to make it easier for them to work with devices on a network, and Adobe Systems' Flash multimedia software.

By tricking a victim into viewing a malicious Flash file, an attacker could use UPnP to change the primary DNS server used by the router to find other computers on the Internet. This would give the attacker a virtually undetectable way to redirect the victim to fake Web sites. For example, a victim with a compromised router could be taken to the attacker's Web server, even if he typed Citibank.com directly into the Web browser navigation bar.

The InfoWorld article's title is "Flash attack could take over your router", but it's really much more general than that: a maliciously-crafted flash movie could theoretically take over any UPnP device as long as it could guess its local IP address. Routers just happen to be ubiquitous, and come with only a limited number of default setups.

Turn off UPnP on any device where it's not absolutely essential. The article says, "Users could avoid this attack by turning UPnP off on their routers, where it is normally enabled by default, but this would cause a variety of popular applications, such as IM software, games, and Skype, to break and require manual configuration on the router", but it's not as bad as all that. Skype, IM, and games work perfectly well on my kids' Windows boxes, and my router is a Linux box without UPnP.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft is a major promoter of UPnP -- it stands for "Universal Plug and Play" and, like so many "features" from Microsoft, it's supposed to make things easier for their users. If they made cars, they'd all have the same key because somebody with two cars might get them mixed up.

The project for yesterday was getting Dorsai, my "new" recording box, set up
with a realtime kernel and the right set of applications. Specifically,
the plan was to install the 64-bit version of Debian Etch (the base for 64Studio), and the 64-bit version of UbuntuStudio (which, being based on
Gutsy Gibbon, includes Audacity 1.3.3). Along the way, I wanted to make
the multi-OS Grub menu work properly. It took all afternoon.

This afternoon's challenge is completely different. The Wolfling
has a batch of documents, taken off her old computer, that she needs to
print. Unfortunately, they were written in Microsoft Works,
which has a proprietary format incompatible with everything in the known
universe, and the only copy in the house is on that old computer. So I
have to get it back in operation somehow I have it in the office hooked up
to my KVM switch, so with luck it will Just Work[tm], but this is Windows
we're talking about. (... OK, it boots. But I never made myself an
account on it, so she'll have to deal with it when she gets home, unless I
can do it from the guest account. The fact that it won't shut down
properly doesn't help.) Maybe the recently freed version of Works will
work on Colleen's machine. Maybe.

5:45pm Guest was able to print from the keychain drive. And there is
much rejoicing.

Finally set the workgroup on the YD's new laptop, thanks to a couple of
Windows geeks on the flist. Oddly enough, I'd been on that tab
(System/Computer Name) earlier to fix a typo I'd made during setup, but
failed to notice the default workgroup. This may have been in part
because I was expecting it to be the old default name, WORKGROUP, instead
of the current one, which is apparently MSHOME. I had also spent quite a
lot of time looking in the networking area, which is where things like the
DNS (name server) parameters hang out, and where the system and workgroup
names were in earlier versions of Windows.

That machine has had its IP address, DNS name, and firewall rules changed,
and its software updated, more times than I can remember over the last
year and a half. I think the last time I took it down was to change the
battery on the UPS.

Look, folks -- if somebody with a masters in computer science and 40-odd
years experience in the computer industry has trouble navigating
Microsoft's pile of obscure icons, oddly-named tabs, and twisty
little popups crap, it is not ready to put on the desktops
of non-technical users. And before the Mac users reading this jump in,
ask yourselves what IP forwarding rules are doing over in "sharing" rather
than "network". (Sure, it's obvious that IP packet routing has more to do
with "connection sharing" than with "network connections" -- obvious once
you know it!) I'm not saying that Linux is perfect in this respect, or
even a whole lot better. But at least everything you need to tweak is in
one directory, in text files you can search. And modern Linux desktops
have control panels that have had more thought put into them, if you want
to go that route.

I'm reasonably convinced that people put up with this nonsense only
because they don't know that things could be different. If you've only
used an OS that crashes every couple of days, you're surprised to hear
somebody complaining about how their flaky Linux box crashes every six
months or so. If you're used to clicking down through a half-dozen
folders to open a file, you're don't know what I'm complaining about when
I gripe because an application doesn't remember what directory it was
started in from the command line. If you're used to reconfiguring your
desktop and reinstalling your favorite applications on every new computer,
you don't know why I keep my home directory on a fileserver. The idea of
having a set of desktop configuration files that haven't been
substantially changed for 15 years is simply inconceivable.

The Y.D.'s laptop is now properly set up with Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
BTW, you'll want to download OOo from a mirror -- the main site is down to
a crawl. You have to scroll down to find the mirror, and then go browsing
around the mirror to find the right image. Bad web-page design.

She can take it from here, except maybe for figuring out how to change her
workgroup name. I couldn't figure it out, either; it would probably take
an hour or so of trying various control-panel icons to find whichever
non-obvious one it's now kept under. I'll ask $EMPLOYER's IT guy in the
morning, if I remember. And at some point we'll want to copy files; the
simplest way is probably to pull the drive and mount it in a USB
enclosure, although booting up Linux and sharing it with Samba is a
possibility as well.

I don't appear to have mentioned what we got at Costco yesterday. The
main thing was a SwissGear (Wenger) 24" rolling suitcase for the flower_cat Normally I'm the one who gets luggage, and the Cat
just grumbles about it, but this was purple. Came with a nice
little carry-on bag, as well.

The Dell Vostro 1000 laptop that I ordered for the Younger Daughter
arrived this afternoon. I was shocked at the small amount of packaging --
the huge box was mostly empty. Apparently it uses cleverly-folded
cardboard to keep the styrofoam inner box with the laptop in it from
rattling around too much, but it was still altogether too loose for my
taste. Well, it booted up this evening, so that's ok. Took me a while to
figure out some of the stupid installation steps: after it gets through
figuring out that it's connected to a wired ethernet network and bloody-well
registering itself, it asks you to set up its internet connection
and asks you for your ISP's phone number. At that point you have
to back up three steps and tell it you don't want to set up a connection
now. Idiots!

Spent some time this morning looking at what remains to be done for ABT
and realizing that, no, there's no fscking way I can have it done
by Monday. And besides, I want the versatility of being able to have a
mix of CDROM, CD-Extra, and pure-audio disks on hand. So I fired off an
RFQ to proactionmedia.com (they're not open on weekends). Wish there was
someplace local that did inkjet printing on CDRs.

After the usual weekend 4-mile walk I stopped by Staples, because I'd seen
them on a web search for CD duplicators. What the heck; if they had the
DupliQ I might just buy one. No duplicators, but they did have
a shiny new HP D5160 that (wonder of wonders) prints on CDs!
Apparently somebody's patent has expired, because it used to be an Epson
exclusive. Filed the information away for future reference, and headed
across the street to Fry's to see whether they had it for less.

It was the same price, $89, but there was somebody there from HP who, in
response to my query, said that it worked fine in Linux. HP has been
pretty good about Linux printer drivers, while the latest Epson (the R260,
successor to the R200 that's been giving me grief lately) is listed as a
"paperweight" in the linuxprinting.org database. That clinched it, and I brought it home
just in time to spend the next hour trying to find some way of
printing a character sheet for the Y.D. Turned out that not only was the
Epson suffering from clogged jets, but the cheap print server it's
attached to appeared to be hosed (or at least unresponsive, even after a
power cycle), and the SMB server on Nova appears to be inaccessible to
the Windows machines. Again. GAAAH! And in spite of having what I
thought was a reasonably complete set of fresh ink cartridges, I was
suddenly reminded that I couldn't find a magenta cartridge the last time I
went ink shopping. Guess which one I need. Finally put the page on my
keychain drive, hauled it over to the Linux workstation, and printed it on
the laser printer.

There are lots of reasons why I do most of my reading on the screen these
days, but a well-founded loathing for printers and printing in general,
and Windows printing in particular, is right up there.

Still haven't installed the HP -- no useable print server at the moment --
but I'm hopeful. I've never had particularly good luck with HP equipment,
but I really like the fact that their ink cartridges include the nozzle
assembly, so that even if you haven't used it for months, all you have to
do is change the cartridges to get a totally new, clean, print head.
Unlike the Epson.

Spent the rest of the afternoon fixing ABT's Makefile to correctly (I
hope) write cd-extra (pressed-multi-session) disks, because although it's
perfectly feasible to add audio tracks to a CD-ROM, I don't think most of
my customers will be amused by 20 minutes of silence on track 1.

After spending a couple of hours worth of trial-and-error searching, it
seems that the dialog box for changing the node name and workgroup of a
computer running Windows XP is no longer part of the network connection
dialog -- the one with the list of protocols -- but hangs off a
menu labeled "Advanced". Grump. My problem is that I know too
much.

Meanwhile, the chaoswolf has gotten her new computer to see
the local workgroup by setting up a VPN?? Weird. (It's true that our
network topology is, um, unusual. I'm guessing that the VPN config stuff
lets her search for workgroups, and be part not only of the "local" one
she's misconfigured, but of the "remote" one as well.) But it ain't broke,
so I'm not going to run around the house trying to fix it.

For reference purposes, the current name of the household Windows
workgroup is "Workgroup", not "STARPORT" the way it used to be.
Meanwhile, if you want to be able to browse around your network
neighborhood the way you used to be able to, install Xandros.

Stupid goddamn Windows! For some reason, Windows on the Younger
Daughter's machine wasn't responding to the keyboard. Mouse worked fine,
and the keyboard worked for the bootloader and Windows login, so it's not
hardware. Anything I could think of to do to fix it would, of course,
involve typing in a URL to find software. Nuke and pave. Takes roughly
half an hour to load the install image from three CDs, and probably
another two hours to install a minimally useful set of programs (Firefox,
OOo, network config for the printers). Foo.

Fry's doesn't seem to have their $250 Windows boxen on sale today, but
they do have $450 laptops. Of course, at that price they're
probably junk (my experiences with off-brand laptops have not
been happy ones), and it's still $200 more than I was planning to
spend. It would probably have trouble running Linux, too -- laptop
displays are notoriously weird. The Cygwin X server would mitigate that
problem, of course.

... OK, I wasn't looking hard enough. It's on the back page of their
Friday flier; twice as fast a CPU as the laptop, and I know it
runs Linux. Pretty easy two-stage install: use Xandros to resize the NTFS
partition, then blow it away and replace with DeMuDi or Etch. (Sigh! I
was thinking of getting a flash recorder with that money...)

... is an aging Windows 98 machine. The disk seems to be flaking out --
it hangs in Scandisk. I was able to "fix" it tonight by booting into
Linux, mounting it, and unmounting it. But that's clearly not a long-term
fix. And much as I'd like to declare the office a Windows-less zone,
that won't work either -- everyone would just hang out in the
back bedroom on the flower_cat's machine. I could probably
put in a new drive and keep it limping along for a while, but 98 is still
a flake, and a 500MHz K6 is looking pretty slow these days.

So it looks as though I'll be wasting money on another cheap XP machine
from Fry's the next time they have them on sale. At least I know how to
make the damned things quieter now. Another $300 I wasn't planning on
spending.